“College presidents for free speech”?

Ivy Leaguers get caught in their webs of nonsense

University of Pennsylvania Liz Magill, testifying to Congress shortly before her resignation

Last week, it felt like the 60’s all over again. College administrators were defending free speech, and Republicans wanted students punished for freely speaking.

Is there any place on earth besides college campuses, and perhaps North Korea, where censorship has been practiced with such full-throated vigor? And haven’t conservatives taken up the banner of free speech, campaigning against the dreaded cancel culture?

No, we weren’t dreaming. We’re watching the awkward shifting of political positions by people who either don’t understand or simply ignore the values that underlie them.

We see this jersey-switching routinely, of course. For instance, whenever a party takes over the White House, they immediately stop complaining about the national debt, a cause immediately taken up by the now out-of-power party.

Hypocrisy notwithstanding, it’s worthwhile to dig into our troubled schools and the nuances of free speech.

American society, more than any other on earth, values free expression, which we’ve enshrined as the first articulated right of our Constitution.

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

Yet as straightforward as that looks, our government routinely restricts free speech, and we’re all for it. No serious person argues to freely allow fraud, perjury in courtrooms, an honest-to-goodness insurrection, or blogging the codes to our nuclear weapons. 

We’ve refined this into criminal and civil codes that we all generally understand. Our laws sometimes punish speech, not because of its unpopularity, but for the underlying justice.

But those restrictions legally allow a whole host of ugly, unpleasant speech to be spoken. Schools and social media took things further, creating restrictions of speech that could be upsetting (hate! bullying!) or, sometimes, just wrong (misinformation!).

At the Congressional hearings, Harvard president Claudine Gay pretended as though their speech codes kept debates civil and varied. She described the school as “a community where we honor, celebrate, and nurture open discourse both on the campus and in the classroom.” That was, of course, an absolute lie.

Instead, these schools have policies that could be interpreted wildly by hall monitors of all ages. In turn, they’re used less for civil discourse and more as a weapon to punish the unpopular kids. On campuses and online, unbridled immaturity combined with fake righteousness turned into a nightmare. 

The Harvard Anti-Bullying Policy is Exhibit A. It opens by defining bullying as “aggression by words or actions that humiliate, degrade, demean, intimidate, or threaten an individual or individuals'' that are severe enough to create an “environment that a reasonable person would consider intimidating, hostile, or abusive.”

The “Determination Panel” then enforces its re-education–”e.g., training, coaching, or other measures, as appropriate”–to “eliminate the conduct.” 

Of course, “reasonable people” are in short supply on campuses, many of which literally have “safe spaces” where people of color can temporarily flee the oppressive presence of people with less melanin. Combine that with vague language, and every Determination Panel becomes a Banana Court.

Here are three of 2,546 examples: 

• USC suspended a communication professor for saying the word “nèi ge” because, well, you know what THAT could sound like.

• Harvard fired an instructor for inviting renowned social scientist Charles Murray, author of the controversial The Bell Curve to speak in a class. 

• When a conservative group distributed a sticker saying “China Kinda Sus”—slang for suspicious—Emerson College censors were faster than their communist compatriots. After an investigation, the school determined this sticker violated its “Bias Related Behavior”.

Given all this, when asked whether “calling for the genocide of Jews” would violate their school’s wide-open harassment policies, the Ivory Tower ladies each turned into Perry Mason for the defense. Even if their responses were correct descriptions of their policies, their hypocrisy was self-evident. They earned the disdain they’re facing.

Personally, I’d prefer to send my child to a school that relies on the actual legal code to punish speech. It works pretty well for the rest of us.

    – Ken